Westfall stays true to his love of planar geometry, while finding ways to undermine all traces of predictability and stability.
Alexandre Gallery
The Disturbing Greatness of Hyman Bloom
Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock considered Hyman Bloom to be America’s first Abstract Expressionist, a label, it should be pointed out, that the artist himself rejected.
The Difficulty of Getting the News: Lois Dodd, Sally Hazelet Drummond, and the Narrative of Exclusion
What the exhibition of Drummond and Dodd proves is that the art world was more diverse in the 1960s than has been told.
Painting an Eclectic Mysticism Rooted in Modernism
Gregory Amenoff’s paintings mix influences with knowing exuberance.
So Much Depends…
In 1952, Lois Dodd, along with four other artists, started the Tanager Gallery on East Fourth Street, near the Bowery, one of the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York.
Slip, Sliding Away with John Walker
What do Richard Diebenkorn and John Walker have in common? When they sink their teeth into something, they aren’t likely to let it go.
Lois Dodd’s Paintings of the Ephemeral
In recent weeks, I have written about what I have defined as a grown-up painter, as opposed to what I called “the latest manifestation of a male adolescent painter, a clichéd archetype that gained traction in the Neo-Expressionist ‘80s, with the rise of Julian Schnabel, and has not been thrown over because lots of people still find this sort of chest thumping entertaining.”
Paintings Like Sand in Your Teeth: John Walker at Seal Point
Disclosure, in John Walker’s paintings, comes slowly. A dominant motif — zigzag stripes ranging up, down and across the canvas — colonizes the surface, establishing it as a realm of aggressively brushed abstract patterns. Then one by one, various incidentals emerge — a densely wooded island, a rocky outcropping, the flat disk of the sun — and suddenly you’re looking at a vertically tilted, crazily Cubistic landscape.
The Power of Three Small Paintings
While touring a few of the many small exhibition spaces scattered throughout the city, I was pleasantly reminded that painting requires neither heroic-sized canvases nor the prestige of whitewashed airplane hangars to succeed as significant art.
In the Dark, Shuttered House of Painting with Richard Walker
Richard Walker is an observational painter who seems particularly interested in light, a concern that goes back to the Impressionists and the beginnings of modern art. However, if you think you are going to get a sugary rehash of Claude Monet, you are in for a surprise.
Like American Haikus in Paint
Like the Jack Kerouac’s three line poems, Lois Dodd is able to capture the essence of her subjects through simplicity and directness of expression.